Blaise Midnight, Biomedical Engineer with Zoetek Medical, talks about daily operation of a Midmark M11/M9 Sterilizer.

Hi, this is Blaise Midnight with another Zoetek Tek Tip. Today you’re talking about the operation of the Midmark M9/ M11 Sterilizer. Today you have an M11 here, but an M9 is just a slightly smaller version. Functionally, they’re identical. The only difference is the size of the chamber is a little bit larger on an M11, the diameter and the depth at opposed to an M9.

But as far as the controls and operating, they’re going to be exactly the same. So, what you will learn today applies to both the M9 and the M11. The first thing you want to do if you’re going to sterilize is you want to open the door and take a look inside. And you want to look at the water level. As you can see, there’s a clear tube here and you can see the water level inside.

As you can see, there’s a reddish color here and a green area. You want to always make sure your water is in the green area of the tube. If it’s not, you need to add additional water into this little funnel right here. And then you’ll see the water come up. And once it’s up in your green, preferably towards the top of the green, you’re ready to sterilize.

Now, only distilled water goes into here. Never use any tap water or any other kind of water. Distilled water only is what’s recommended, or you could damage this sterilizer. So, you want to make sure distilled water only. It’s now ready to run.

Pull out your trays and put whatever it is you want to sterilize in your sterilizer. Slide it in. When you’re loading your sterilizer, don’t pack things too tightly. You don’t want things all pressed together.

You want to be able to have the steam inside there circulate around the whole exterior of whatever it is you’re trying to sterilize. If you pack them too tightly, it will not sterilize as well. You want to get good sterilization. So, make sure you don’t overpack your chamber. At this point, you’re ready to close the door.

Lift up on this handle, push it closed, and then snap it down. And the door latch is closed, On this sterilizer, the M9 and M11, you have four pre-programmed sterilization cycles, which are what most people use, but it also has the ability to use program one and program two. These are here for you to program your own sterilization. And we’ll go through that briefly on how to set those programs up to what you want.

But, if you want to run one of these, if you press one, it will tell you on there what the cycle is, how long it is running for in minutes, and what the temperature is and depending on what your facility requires for whatever it is you’re sterilizing. One of these is probably going to be just fine for you. For instance, the unwrapped is at 270 degrees for three minutes and has a 30 minute dry cycle.

You have pouches. Again, this is 270 degrees for four minutes and a 30 minute dry cycle. The Packs is a 250 degrees for 30 minutes and also has a 30 minute dry cycle. And then there’s Handpieces, which would be basically in a pouch. So that’s another 270 degrees for four minutes, and again, a 30 minute dry cycle. Again, these are all pre-programmed.

Now, one and two here allow you to program your own cycles if you have another requirement. Most people don’t. But if you did, you could hit cycle one. This one currently has 270 degrees for 15 minutes with a 30 minute cycle. If you want to program it, you push the program and the first thing that would pop up says “sterilization temperature”. Push the plus or minus to change it so you can increase and decrease, within reason, the temperature you want that sterilization cycle to be. When you’re done with that, you push the Program button again, it’ll go to your sterilization time. You push the plus and minus to pick however many minutes you want it to sterilize. You hit it again, it’ll say what type of it is, a fast vent or a liquid cycle, which would be a very slow cooling down cycle so that your liquids don’t boil over inside.

And then your last one would be your dry time, which you could set for zero or anytime you want, pretty much within reason. And then you hit it again and your Program one gets set into that one. Do the same for two. You hit two, you hit program. It basically walks you through the four steps.

So, you’ve loaded your sterilizer. You know you’ve got plenty of water in it. You’re going to select a preset cycle – unwrapped. At that point, all you have to do is push the start button, and it will automatically fill with water.

It’ll automatically go through the sterilization cycle, and when it’s done, it will vent. And if you have a dry time selected, it will dry whatever it is you have in there for that period of time you have selected in that cycle. Before it goes into the dry cycle, when it finishes its sterilization cycle, the door will automatically pop open slightly.  It’ll beep several times and say, “door about to open”.

At that point, the door latch will slowly lift up. It’ll pop open just a little bit all by itself. And then it will continue into the dry cycle. If you’ve selected a dry cycle, it will continue through the dry cycle to the end, and then it will alarm that it’s completed. If you have no Dry Time selected, then it will automatically just end at that point.

At that point you can lift the handle and open it up. You remove whatever it is you have sterilized. And at that point it’s basically ready to start all over again. So, that’s really easy. These M11’s and M9’s are nice, sturdy units and they’re easy to operate.

Thank you for watching Zoetek Medical Tek Tips. Keep an eye open for more tech tips and feel free to contact us at any time if you have any questions about anything we’ve covered or anything else that we can help with. I’m Blaise Midnight for Zoetek Medical.